Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

With Lemmy, doesn’t it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?

This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I’m quite enjoying myself here.

  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

    This premise on which your question is based isn’t actually true though. There’s /r/technology and also /r/tech. There’s /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

    I feel like what you’re observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a “winner” sub with more participation because… unless there’s a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.

    Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries… and over time you’ll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.

  • TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.pageEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I think people, including u/spez, are not remembering how fluid a lot of subs were on reddit. The large subs grew to where they were by luck and good moderation, they weren’t/aren’t immune to upset, and reddit maintains/ed several smaller competing communities for every main one (games, gaming, truegaming). The same will happen here eventually but we need time to see who’s actually running the best communities, not whoever got to the name technology on the largest instance first.

      • CookieJarObserver@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Thats not necessarily true. Behaw is also very big, feddit de as well. And there is no “winning” you can just have multiple…

          • falconfetus8@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            I noped out of Beehaw when I read this. Those bolded parts(and only the bolded parts) raised some alarm bells in my brain.

            The issue as I see it with modern social media is the way in which rules are enforced. There are many good reasons to itemize specific behavior which is not allowed, but the downside is that extremely specific rules are easy to maneuver around. We’ve all experienced someone who’s a real jerk on the internet but manages to never get banned because they never explicitly violate any rules. I’m not sexist, they’ll claim, but happen to post a lot of articles calling into question modern feminism or criticize the wage gap.

            I think many people today would agree that someone ‘debating’ the benefits of phrenology in the open would constitute racist behavior, but there was a time and place in the world where it was considered real science, despite many scientists distancing themselves from this field very early on and critics writing scathing commentaries on this emerging field. This same guise of civility is frequently exercised by bigots, with modern examples of sexism, homophobia and transphobia being easily found on nearly any major social media platform.

            Humans are pretty good at figuring out when someone is being a dick online, even if they are acting within the defined rules, and one solution to this problem is to recenter humans in our online social platforms. The idea of not having a ton of explicit rules, and instead having simple rules like “Be(e) nice” is a startling one for most, because it upends what we’ve come to know and expect from the internet. However, by keeping the rules simple and instead attempting to enforce the spirit behind the rules, we’re able to deal more effectively with problematic individuals and create a space in which you aren’t worried about whether you’re going to have explain to someone why you’re a human and why you shouldn’t be subject to incessant bigotry online.

            The lack of clear rules just sounds ripe for power tripping.

            Do note that I am NOT objecting to the need to create a bigotry-free zone. It’s important that Lemmy avoids getting infected by racism and hate, lest it end up like Voat. It’s just those bolded parts that give me bad vibes about the place.

  • Ice@lemmy.icyserver.euEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now let’s say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.

    Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers

  • Kaldo@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think there’s been talk of implementing “multireddits” so you can combine them in your own feed but who knows when it’s coming. I personally think it’s good to have the communities as segmented as possible, if one goes to shit then you can easily just stop participating there and move to others.

  • Krusty@feddit.itEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    It’s a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don’t think democratically and rule against other people’s will deleting posts and banning everyone they don’t like.

    With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)

    • Blue@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      This assumes that power doesn’t corrupt and that the big “kind” communities don’t eventually turn bad.

      • Krusty@feddit.it
        2·
        2 years ago

        That’s exactly the point: if they become “bad”, we can always move to another one with the same name but on another instance

  • DudePluto@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    It will sort itself out. The only difference is reddit’s search function works slightly better because it’s centralized, but I think that issue will be solved eventually

    • Jordan Jenkins@lemmy.wizjenkins.comEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I could see a good use case for having at least a centralized, cross instance search where the instances will send up community information to the service and then the service shares it out with everyone. Rather than make a new community on my instance I could find the active community and federate it.

      Then again the same thing happens on Reddit for popular topics. Like when a new game is announced there might be 5 people trying to start the subreddit for it.